


He even served with him

by Lilliburlero



Series: Consistently Homesick [10]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Break Up, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Dysfunctional Relationships, Ex Sex, Foley Effects, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sectarianism, Spanking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2018-08-15 12:38:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8056732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: A prequel to 'A backward and dilapidated province'. By the end of the war, Ralph and Laurie's relationship has become strained to breaking-point. For a time, each of them goes his own way.*Note: period-typical attitudes and language in re: sexuality, religion, race, disability; internalised homophobia, mentions of PTSD and violence, mentions of (canonical) underage sex.





	1. It dissolves in water

They both came to think of it as the General Election Row, though it didn’t happen on the night of the election, on which they were apart, but almost three months afterwards, and disliking scenes as they did, neither raised his voice. It began in the affectionate fractiousness of disagreements between intimates, each of whom believes he can anticipate the other’s arguments a little more precisely than is actually so, and grew vituperative as political disputes tend to between persons who have cast their choice in the same way for quite opposite reasons. Laurie had voted in a spirit of disinterested pessimism; Ralph in sceptical pragmatism: it turned personal before a third of the bottle of Black & White had been drunk.

‘Mary, you have delighted us long enough,’ Laurie muttered, casting his eyes up at chipped, nicotined plasterwork. 

‘What?’ 

‘Lecturing.’ 

‘Was I? Light me one too, will you?’ 

‘You were. Positively parsonical.’ Laurie handed over the cigarette. ‘In the eighteenth century the virger would have left a flask of brandy and a bucket in the pulpit, but it’s not considered quite so amusing now.’ 

‘Wesley used to make a point of requesting it, actually. Not the bucket.’ Ralph saw his smile grimly unreturned. ‘Oh, you’ve overdone—’ He made a enquiring feint at Laurie’s knee. 

‘No I haven’t, yes I have taken, no it didn’t help, yes it _bloody_ does, and no you damn well can’t. Don’t _meddle_. The Cardew female thinks another operation before the end of the year, but it’ll only hold so long before they’ll need to have at it again. There’s enlightened self-interest for you. All aboard the Social Ambulance.’ 

Ralph poured himself two-and-a-half fingers and waited for the courtesies inculcated in the nursery to supervene upon tiredness and pain. 

‘You meant well. I’m sorry,’ Laurie conceded. 

‘That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? What drew me to you from the off: _you_ never meant well. Except once. And that has made all the difference.’ 

‘No. Not this. Don’t.’ Laurie raised his hands, palms down, in a quick gesture at once irritable and forlorn. ‘For starters, it’s gross self-pity—’ 

‘Filthy enough. Better to pity oneself than involve another boy in it, though.’ 

Laurie’s lips tightened into a maidenly moue. _Unfair to maidens_ , Ralph thought; the putative few he was acquainted with didn’t make such vinegar faces. 

‘You can’t reasonably expect an answer to that. All that’s possible is reassurance.' 

‘Quite.’ 

‘What do you mean?’ 

‘I mean,’ Ralph pronounced laboriously; he was well on the way to being stinking pissed, and he’d come to this glum drunk with four hours sleep in the last forty-eight. ‘I can’t know whether I was taken on out of pity or—something more, not just from your being here. Whichever way it was, you’d have come back to me. And whichever way it is, you’d feel you couldn't leave.’ 

‘Oh, for God’s sake, drop it. You’re more intelligent than this. It’s the merest sophistry; it’s making life and—death into—into a form of _repartee_ —’ 

The air seemed to congeal, then sublimed with a shiver, leaving everything changed. 

‘Likely. Very likely,’ he said slowly, stubbing out his cigarette and watching Laurie’s expression coalesce into the mixture of confusion, defiance and readiness to make excuse that he’d first seen in his study twelve years before. 

‘Ralph, I didn’t mean it to come out like this.’ 

Ralph submitted blandly to a helpless caress, returned it distractedly, drawing Laurie’s head onto his shoulder. 

‘It’s all right. I know. I pushed it. I didn’t know how little it would take. My poor Spud. You must have been at the end of your tether.’ 

‘It doesn’t mean—and of course I ought to have told you outright that I read the letter. But how could I, at the time? Then the moment when I could say anything passed—and I was happy, often happy.’ 

‘Not so very often on your own account.’ 

‘Well. I mean, is one ever?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

Laurie looked up and sat back. The rims and whites of his eyes were spiritously pink. ‘It doesn’t necessarily—it doesn’t have to mean—’ he began. 

‘What’s the point though, when it does? There are probably prettier ways to find out, I grant you. Much uglier ones too. But the form of the thing matters a lot less than you seem to think.’ He was about to add _ask Raynes, if you’re still in touch_ , but found he had no appetite for even that little cruelty. ‘And you mustn’t worry. You’ve mewed yourself up rather needlessly, you know. Self-destructiveness is largely soluble in salt water.’ 

‘And when release group 22 comes up?’ 

‘As far as I can tell, the solvent effects are permanent. I’d rather it had been otherwise between us: don’t ever think I didn’t. But you’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, or fret about. Come to bed. Come to bed with me.’ 

The back of Laurie's neck tensed under his hand. ‘If you’re insisting on goodbye, I’d rather it stay a verbal one.’ 

‘Do you really?’ 

‘Not in and of itself, no. But I think it’s for the best, this time.’ 

‘This time?’ 

‘Oh, don’t be obtuse. Little as we see of one another, we couldn’t have sustained five years on a sense of obligation.’ 

‘You mean you couldn’t have. I don’t have that peculiar solace, remember? Look, forget it. But you must see it’s more than slightly mad, to send me packing for the one thing you actually want and can’t get from anyone else.’ 

His presumptuousness passed without apparent remark, let alone contradiction, but there was no comfort in that. 

‘I’m not sending you packing.’ 

‘Oh, Spud. I think we’ve been through this.’ 

‘And I suppose that offer of a—farewell wasn’t repeating anything? Simply irrepressible concupiscence?’ 

‘Sometimes a fuck is just a fuck, my dear. You might have the chance to find out quite how much so, now. I hope you don’t.’ 

‘Only be disgusting if you can be honest along with it. If you’re trying to say you didn’t think to make yourself indispensable, those last few weeks I was in hospital—if you haven’t always tried to—to _bribe_ me—if you’re not doing it now—’ 

Ralph felt a crude, maudlin impulse towards hurtful half-truth, and gave in to it with self-punishing ease. ‘Take some damn responsibility. If you need to act out a melodrama of duty and self-sacrifice to justify your really rather avid taste for arse, admit it, and we’ll start again from there.’ 

‘Melodrama. I think the answer to that goes without saying.’ Laurie looked at him with pale, plain dislike, untempered even by anger, then turned his head away. 

‘It doesn’t, actually. Or at least, I’m going to make you bloody well say it.’ 

‘You put the receiver back,' Laurie said to the gas fire. 'If I'd rung, I could have got through. There was no need for—for—' 

Some minute imprecision, like a trifling mistake made early in a calculation that produces a result hopelessly awry, struck Ralph with more force than the content of Laurie's speech. Frustrated that he could not identify it through whisky and exhaustion, he snapped, ‘Your act of mercy? It might contradict precepts absorbed at Mother's knee, darling, but the fact is most people don't want to be tactfully deceived for their own good. That's how the whole wretched muddle began. How long were you planning to keep it up, anyway? A bloody lifetime?’ 

'That's not how it is—was. Once I saw you I had no choice.' Laurie crossed his arms, gripping the elbows tightly. Strain made him look elderly and infantile at once, like a slum child. 

'And I was supposed to give you one. Tell me, is it enough for you, if I just go away?' 

‘For Christ’s sake don’t be histrionic. I didn’t mean it like that.’ 

‘I don’t think there's another way _to_ mean it, is there?' A sense of the utter futility of verbal self-defence overtook him, as it had at every crisis in his life, and once before with Laurie. But this was less like that time and more like the occasions on which he'd stood before his mother, Jeepers, the Head, his father. He could almost wish it otherwise, to know at least that Laurie was the cynosure without which he was lost, but whatever remained of that lethal impulse had been worn smooth, a cruel shard turned to sea-glass. 'Oh, stuff it, Laurie, just fucking stuff it all. Go to bed. I shan’t follow.’ 

They sat in silence, staring at the tidemark around the walls, as if waiting for some token of irrevocability, a moment at which any possibility of salvage was placed definitively beyond reach. Some immeasurable interval, perhaps very short, passed before Laurie got up and went into the niche of a bedroom, separated from the sitting-room by a sliding door. It had the effect of a small, sensitive boy shutting himself into a wardrobe to be upset. Ralph took a heaving breath that might have issued equally in a laugh, a sob or a retch, but exhaled harmlessly. A coarse ululation sounded from the street outside: inscrutable but immediate. He set himself to the remainder of the whisky, drinking quickly and mechanically enough to make his eyes water, as if he feared he might fall asleep before it was finished. He did not, and not for some time after the bottle was empty. When it came, the sleep was troubled but dreamless. He woke with a sour mouth, but otherwise feeling quite all right, as if he'd got away with something. The memory of the previous night arrived in exact coincidence with a punishing headache. He turned his face into the sofa cushions and very nearly _howled_. 

In the end his hangover proved some distraction from the doleful business of packing: it was that bit harder to be haunted when lifting and bending provoked nausea and even watery late-September sunlight aggravated the pain burrowing between his eyes. There wasn’t much to do. War was as negligent of personal effects as Ralph was habitually careful of them; anyway, he’d had relatively few when it started and hadn’t replaced most of those he’d lost. If he’d stopped to reflect on it, he might have diagnosed some faint superstitious notion that a minimum of worldly goods kept him buoyant. 

‘Hullo, Spud. Would you like tea?’ 

‘There’s none, unless you brought your ration—oh, thanks. I’ll make it. You don’t have to do this now.’ 

‘No use in prolonging it, as I think you pointed out last night.’ 

‘Please don’t.’ 

‘Very well. Look, when I’ve fixed something I’ll send directions for this lot. You’ll see Alec on his birthday, won’t you? Will you give him—’ Ralph tapped a parcel. 

‘Mm. I’d planned to go up, anyway, but—’ 

‘I’ll write and tell him; you shan’t have to explain.’ 

‘That’s not what I meant. It's not just his birthday, is it?’ 

‘Oh. I see. That was very stupid of me; blame the hangover. I’d post it, but it’s heavy and breakable. A decanter. Astonished I got it across the Atlantic intact.’ 

‘No. I’ll probably see him before you do, even if I don’t go to the party.’ 

But Laurie must have gone to the party, because that was where he met Keith Lockhart. The _coup de foudre_ was mutual, and apparently complete. Ralph knew Lockhart slightly, as it happened; his mental file-entry for him: _First of_ Compass Rose _, faithful type, stayed with his Old Man in_ Saltash _; queer question-mark question-mark_ , now assumed a ghastly irony. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is from W.H. Auden, 'In Praise of Limestone'.
> 
> The General Election Row has its origins in ['To Strive, To Seek'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1592480), by AJHall.


	2. Deciding to depart

The period that followed was rather black. Ralph’s demob leave was almost a void, luridly spiked by the sort of people and places he’d long thought he could live without. _A need for oblivion only tempered by occasional disinclination to deal with spivs_ , he wrote later. He thought that was a moderately nice turn of phrase, and used it to someone who’d been around at the time; the man winced back a difficult smile. Ralph hadn’t thought of it being as bad as all that.

A temporary civilian position at the St-Anne's-Byfleet station wasn’t something Ralph would have welcomed _before_ —well, before. It seemed on the one hand a royal road to membership of the large and growing class of the unemployed, of whose condition Ralph knew a little more than most former public schoolboys. On the other—there was no other, or not much left, anyway, he thought savagely. He wrote to accept. A lot of it was dull administrative work, all sense of exigency gone. 

On his first half-day he took the bus over to St-Anne’s-Oldport, with a thought of walking the few miles back along the coast road if the weather held. Before the war, Byfleet had attempted to relive its Victorian heyday as a genteel resort, and had as a consequence an air of tawdry, pointless vanity, reminding Ralph of the sort of party he was once again trying not to go to. Oldport had remained more or less a fishing village, and was ugly in the way that such settlements tended to be when they were still functioning for something more than tourist trade. Nothing much doing at the harbour, so he turned in to the pub at the end of the hard. 

He ordered a pint of bitter, but it was off. So was the mild. He didn’t see the point in mild, anyway. 

‘Everything’s off,’ growled a hoary ancient at the bar. ‘Tell the lad what you do have, Martha, save us a bit of time.’ 

‘We’ve this pale stuff, local, it is,’ she said, ‘and cider, and some spirits.’ Ralph could not afford, for any meaning of the verb, spirits, but he thought he could probably rise above cider, so he inclined his head to the pump. 

‘Local. It’s some sort of chemicals. No right barley in it at all,' complained the old man. 

‘It is local, though, Jake. The brewery’s just over Beeches Hill. Elevenpence, please.’ 

‘I don’t think it’s synthetic,’ Ralph said after a mouthful, ‘I drank a fair bit of synthetic beer in North Africa, and none of it was as disgusting as this.’ 

The barmaid returned with a penny and a frosty look. Suddenly the other end of the bar seemed to need urgent swabbing. 

‘There with the Eighth Army, were you?’ asked Jake, looking frankly at Ralph’s left hand. He rarely wore the glove these days. After the lividity of the scars had faded, he’d found most people didn’t have the exquisite sensibilities of Bridstow tarts. 

‘No. A few years before the war. Tramp steamers, mostly. I took that a bit later, but still early on. Rough Channel crossing.’ 

The greybeard loon visibly unwound, and lost about two hundred and twenty-five years in an expression which was rather the straightening of invisible lips from habitual downturn than anything most people might understand as a smile. His shaggy head was big and heavy on a body almost elfin in its slightness, his face, where visible, for his beard reached to his cheekbones, as heavily scored as a schoolroom desk. 

The low door into the public bar opened in a way that suggested the entrant was not a potential patron. A wiry, dark man wearing canvas trousers and a thick, dirty jumper stepped swiftly across to Ralph’s interlocutor and took his arm. 

‘Jake, for all love. Elsie Carter brought your dinner over and when she got no answer she thought there’d been a nasty accident and hammered like the devil. Lucky I was in, or there’d have been a death notice in tomorrow’s _Crier_ , you know what this place is for gossip. It’s in the range drying to a frazzle.’ His accent was unexpectedly educated, with only a touch of the locality around the Rs. 

‘Daft bint. Anyone knows if I’m not in the kitchen at dinnertime I’m in here.’ 

‘She’s _twelve_ , Dad. She could scarcely come barging into a p.h. in her gymslip even if she did know your dissolute habits. And I could well’ve done with not being woken up.’ He turned to Ralph. ‘I beg your pardon. No-one ever saw fit to teach me that quarrelling with one’s family in public is unedifying.’ 

Jake bellowed appreciation; Ralph perceived he was in the presence of a _modus vivendi_ rather than an embarrassing row and looked at the younger man properly for the first time. 

‘It’s Anquetil, isn’t it? Robert Anquetil?’ 

Anquetil had passed through the Bridstow station back in 1940, on his way to higher things. Ralph hadn’t got to know him well: he remembered an air of reserved decisiveness, the sort of fellow who came to conclusions slowly but whom you’d have to knock cold to dissuade from a course of action he’d determined upon and thought was right. Not much doubt about his sexual inclinations, but independent from the company Ralph kept and was mostly ashamed of: either he had somebody, or a gift for sublimation on the T.E. Lawrence level. One heard of him later having distinguished himself pretty immoderately in the Commandos, maybe sublimation was it. 

‘Yes—I’m sorry, I don’t?’ He spoke with the discouraging sharpness of someone who is known locally and wishes he weren't. 

‘No, I don’t imagine you would. Ralph Lanyon. I was at Bridstow.’ 

Anquetil’s tone softened into real apology. ‘Oh, yes—I mean, I was there, at the beginning of the war, for a few weeks. Still don’t, I’m afraid. I’m usually better with faces and names. How do you do?’ 

This touching reunion had lost Jake’s interest. 

‘Sit yourself up here and have a pint of this piss, Robbie, and tell me if you can taste anything but potatoes in it. Martha!’ 

They made their escape from Jake after two more pints, with the excuse of showing Ralph over the _Golden Enterprise_. She was a lovely thing: thirty-eight foot, gaff cutter rigged, with a sturdy feel and bluff, benign manner. Ralph frowned slightly in recollection. 

‘She's a Brixham mumble-bee, isn't she?’ 

Anquetil tilted his head in mildly impressed enquiry. 

‘We—my family used to spend the holidays at Great Yarmouth,' Ralph explained. 'Once there were some men up from Devon, and I saw something very like her then.’ It had been the last of those summers: the next he had worked his way to Iceland, and the following—he was surprised that the memory still had the power to smart as much as it did. 

‘In a manner of speaking. She was built for an artist, actually, who wanted to paint the fishing fleet at sea, a sort of floating studio, but to the specs of a mumble-bee, more or less. He was a friend of Arthur Davies, if that thrills your inner schoolboy.’ 

‘Rather.' 

‘He sailed with him before the first war—and before Davies got his mad fit of Fenianism, I’m afraid. No glamorous gun-running for the _Golden Enterprise_.’ He patted the mast affectionately. ‘Jake bought her from his widow—the artist bloke’s, I mean. Come below?’ 

The cabin was austere, punctiliously scrubbed, touched in places by a shabby, self-sufficient comfort; a guileless projection of its owner's personality. 

'Well, it's all I have in the world,' Anquetil replied to Ralph's unspoken comment. 'Oh, the cottage—a grace and favour arrangement, you might call it. Came to Dad in the 20s, and the leasehold dies with him. No, this is it, for me. Tea?’ 

Ralph hated the sour aftertaste that followed initial refreshment, and Laurie had a way of brewing it to the consistency of paint. It was something of a feat, on two ounces a week, but it was still disgusting. 

‘I keep some brandy for emergencies, but Jake _will_ get at it, and I’m not sure—’ 

‘I’m not an emergency, I hope. Tea’s quite all right, thank you.’ 

Anquetil sang some inane ditty about Indians and Russians as he busied in the galley: he had a pleasant voice, a lightish baritone. His dark good looks were the sort that develop only in adulthood and are seldom recognised by their owners; it lent him a delightful unselfconsciousness. But there was melancholy at some middle stratum—not sublimation. There had been somebody, and now there was not, and that was something to do with why Anquetil was here, hair uncombed and clothes streaked with oil, rather than being noticed by Commons sketch-writers for his lucid, unpretentious maiden speech or on the wireless cogently explaining radar for the layman. Ralph realised he was showing an interest of a sort he hadn’t since—since Laurie. That was supposed to be good, except it felt like hell. 

They could both muster the easy-going sociability borne of close quarters and which was at odds with their native temperaments. There were no silences, many anecdotes, no revelation or confidence that might unsettle the other; the very opposite of conversation with Laurie, whose disconcerting tendency to smack insinuation into the open had encouraged Ralph’s own, different impulsiveness. Anquetil’s taste in tea, however, was very much the same as Laurie’s, if anything, a little more so. Ralph left the cabin feeling the sort of unfocussed sentimentality induced by glimpses through windows of strangers’ domesticity. 

‘I say,’ Anquetil said, ‘would you like to come out some night? I don’t know if your schedule permits—’ 

‘Thank you. I’d like that. Are you on the phone? I’m not, I’m afraid.’ 

‘No, sorry. Jake’s superstitious about it. Thinks it might steal his hot air. Drop me a note when you know what your movements are. Pharos Cottage, Carbury Road.’ 

Before he had a chance to, he met Anquetil again, in the station canteen. That wasn’t altogether a surprise, he reflected. Ralph looked up at his approach. 

‘Lanyon. Fancy meeting you here.’ 

Ralph grinned at the deadpan. ‘I have been more flabbergasted to run into a fellow. But I wouldn’t have guessed.’ 

‘I file the odd report.’ 

‘I would offer to stand you a—’ Ralph looked down at the brown liquid congealing in a mug in from of him. 

‘—except there aren’t enough cups to go round. I know. Bloody shambles of a place.’ Anquetil perched against the table. He was clean and neat now, in grey flannels and checked tweed coat, navy-blue jersey and aggressively nondescript tie. He rolled his shoulders back, suppressing a yawn. Ralph found himself entertaining an image of him stripped of the Englishman's civilian uniform, sleepy but ardent. 

Dismissing it briskly, he remarked, ‘It’s deliberate, I think. Maintains a suitable mood of nervous exasperation without the costs of actual surveillance.’ 

‘You could be right. I tend to presume cock-up before conspiracy myself, but one wonders how much of a difference there really is.' Anquetil paused. 'Offer of a sail's still open, by the way—’ His voice and smile were pitched to a frequency unmistakable to anyone with the right receiving equipment. The mental picture of Anquetil naked surfaced again, this time adamant and insistent. Feeling like a traitor, though to whom or what he could not say, Ralph made an equivocating noise. 

'Sorry. Didn't mean to put you on the spot. Write, if you've a mind to.' Anquetil straightened up with a curt, polite nod and turned away. The conscious swift dignity of his departure, Ralph saw and understood, was a pure emanation of self-esteem, assumed for his own benefit and no-one else's. 

Longueurs were fairly frequent at Byfleet; Ralph used his next to request some of Anquetil’s reports: there were more than _the odd one_ , and a couple, he noted with mild discomfort, that he didn’t have clearance for. Those he read were terse and thorough; rising to the sort of officialese wit that Ralph, upon his own attempts, usually ended up regretting as clumsy drollery. But this was the real thing. He shut the grey paper wallet on a page of fine-nibbed, decisive writing. He lit a cigarette. If he wanted what little was available of Anquetil he was pretty certain he could have it without effort, as Anquetil could have what little was going of him. That should do very nicely, for now. He smoked the cigarette down to a friable tab and snatched up a writing block before he could reconsider it. Notes weren’t one of his particular talents, but he managed a page of conventionalities in a hand rounder and less dashing, but otherwise not dissimilar to that in the folder he’d just closed. 

‘Freer, have you a stamp?’ 

David Freer sighed. ‘I do savings certificates and dog licences as well, Lanyon.’ 

‘I haven’t got time to go into town. I want to get something in the next post.’ 

‘Here.’ Freer passed the bright scrap. ‘Billy-doo, is it?’ 

‘Yes,’ Ralph said movingly. ‘Yes, it is,’ rather enjoying Freer’s expression until he realised that he had responded exactly as Laurie would have. 

And when it came to it, he did nothing. He got a kick out of the physical exercise and Anquetil’s ironical company, and against that background it seemed ridiculous to strike attitudes of sensuality. Being only human, Ralph could appreciate Robbie's whip-thin, sinewy strength, the graceful economy of his movements; certain agreeable postures, of unbreakable habit, Ralph registered and stored for retrieval in solitude. But the urgency that possessed him in a rented box with flimsy chintz at the window evaporated aboard the _Golden Enterprise_. For one thing, it reeked of fish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Frank O'Hara, 'To the Harbormaster'.
> 
> This fic's _Golden Enterprise_ is loosely based on [_Golden Vanity_](http://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/register/1673/golden-vanity). Arthur Davies is this universe's Erskine Childers.


	3. The furniture of home

The Anquetils were, by Oldport’s standard, newcomers. Jake’s father was a waiter from St Malô; attracted to England in the late 1870s by the wages his accent could command, he quickly rose to the position of maitre d' at the newly-opened Majestic Hotel in Byfleet, and was able to send for his wife and young family. Jake went to sea in the year of the old Queen's Golden Jubilee, and lived a bachelor until the year before the Great War, when he married in Spanish Town Hortense Percival, schoolmistress. He had no plan to live in England ever again, but after the war took a notion to see it, and show off his wife and three-year-old son to his old friends and relations. Hortense succumbed to influenza a fortnight after their arrival. Grief-stricken, Jake sank his savings into the predecessor of the _Golden Enterprise_ and sent Robert to live with his sister in Redruth. The arrangement was not a success; she disapproved of Jake's marriage and considered its issue in need of civilisation by the most primitive of methods. Jake returned Robert to the care of his widowed mother, whom he had considered—not altogether wrongly—too frail and tired to cope with an energetic small boy in addition to the housework. But the affection that developed between Robert and his grandmother was deep and genuine. She died when he was ten. From then on, aided by neighbours, he was his father's housekeeper. Robert had as a consequence the stony, patient practicality more often encountered in women who only very imperfectly remember a time when they could not polish brass, cook decent plain food, scrub boards, launder and mend clothes; Ralph, who recalled too well the humiliations of learning these skills in his twenties, found himself at once beguiled and repelled by it.

His condition of domestic servitude alienated Robbie from his peers at school, but somehow he caught the eye of the eccentric local gentry, the Foleys, at first as an exotic pet, and then as having an intelligence and charm to be encouraged in a post-war climate of social mobility. He became the fast friend of their youngest son Lewis, and partook—on the occasions when Jake released him—of some of his privilege. Robbie won a scholarship to grammar school and an Oxford exhibition; even with the clout and funds of the Foleys behind him he had to fight tooth and nail to get his father to let him take these up. He worked furiously, having no money to spare and no social life, took a Double First; by then another war was inevitable, and he joined the RNVR. 

The rest was Anquetil’s Good War. At demob, he had returned tamely to Jake and the _Golden Enterprise_. At first, nobody quite understood it: with his education and war record, he might have gone anywhere, done almost anything. Shortly they came to see what it was about, in his maniacal absorption in working the smack, in the times you’d meet him on the street or in the Arms and chat for ten minutes, only to come away knowing you might as well have been talking to the automaton fortune-teller in the Byfleet penny arcade, in his well-maintained stock of humorous anecdotage concerning shipyards, stores and snorkers, in native circumspection turned to jumpy, enervated vigilance. But he was hardly the only one to exhibit those tokens of a Good War: and he, unlike others, did not drink to excess or start fights; he was liked and trusted, it seemed, by everyone. 

So implicit was that trust that he was frequently joined aboard the _Golden Enterprise_ by one of the boys of the locality—once, by the intrepid sister of the trepidatious Elsie. Ralph pictured the reaction of some of his former acquaintance to the solemn or hilarious breakfasts taken in such company: a discreet lifted eyebrow, a snigger or cough, a not-so-cryptic murmur—a hard fist squeezed his stomach and he swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. After that he felt he had a reason to let his opportunities slide further. He supposed Robbie did the same, for reasons of his own. 

It was Lewis Foley who broke the impasse, in a manner of speaking. He was on leave in London before beginning one of the educational courses that had become a consistent feature of peacetime naval life. Sir Charles had asked him to use a day or two of it to oversee a final clearance of Mariners before it was put up for sale. 

‘And The Guv'nor’s mildest request has the force of law—like, what is it the Moslems call it—’ 

‘A fatwa,’ Ralph said, earning one of Foley’s (admittedly, liquefying) smiles. Leaving the hands who’d been engaged to stack and carry away debris, scrub paintwork and mop floors to the work, he had taken them up to Mariners’ ‘crow’s nest’, a square platform rising from the roof, complete with a miniature telescope and a little tripper’s view-map showing points of interest. It looked out over a narrow channel of sea, and through the telescope one could see Limpet, the Old Harbour, Carbury, and, furthest along of all, Foley’s Folly Lighthouse. Foley sprawled proprietorially against the railing with his back to the view, Robert to his left, looking out on it, sitting with his legs dangling over the side. Ralph lounged against the opposite rail. Foley’s left hand didn’t touch Robbie’s, but it was close enough that he must be able to feel its warmth in the sharp early-autumn breeze. The eighth of an inch of space was an assertion of right entirely feudal in its scope, and Ralph would have given almost anything to free Robbie from it. He could do that best with calm and cool; steadily bearing in mind how much must have passed between them in this spot without fixing upon it, without visualising— 

‘That’s the one,' Foley said. 'Recondite sort of a thing to know.’ 

‘I read an article about the Shi'ites. And it doesn’t, quite. Have the force of law, I mean. They have fairly frantic set-tos. The whole religion kicked off with one that makes Henry the Eighth and all that look like a spat in the Mothers' Union.’ 

‘Don’t underestimate the Mothers' Union,’ Robbie interjected. ‘But your guv'nor wouldn’t take kindly to being compared to a twopenny-ha’penny imam, would he, Lew? Tsar of all the Russias is more his mark. All those serfs scurrying about down there, barely emancipated—’ 

‘Oh, yes Chekhov and so on.’ Foley said vaguely. ‘The gaga old retainer locked in chuntering away and _noises off_ , a little axe, chop-chop-chop. It _is_ a bit like this, isn’t it? End of the old order and all that.’ 

‘Chekhov wanted it played as a farce,’ Robbie said, ‘but Stanislavski insisted on doing it as tragedy—’ 

‘Well it is, rather, isn’t it?’ Foley said. 

‘Which?’ 

‘Both, you dolt.’ 

‘I meant, the play or selling up.’ 

Foley furrowed his brow comically. ‘Er—still both, I think.’ 

Robbie punched his shoulder. ‘Twat. Seriously, don’t you mind a bit? You always seemed so proud of it.’ 

‘Was I? Of what?’ 

‘Well, the lot. Mariners.The Folly. Being a Foley.’ 

‘Well, I won’t stop being, will I? I regret the lighthouse a bit.' He traced an abstract pattern on the boards, then with a toss of his head brought dark-fringed grey eyes up to meet Ralph's. 'Halycon days, you know.' 

Ralph smiled tightly. 'Does it come as a job lot with the house?' 

'Mm. 'Fraid so. Father tried to get the National Trust interested. I had to take a person called Marsh-Downe to lunch at Quaglino's. He was rather a lamb, but nothing doing. Well, nothing for the lighthouse, anyway. The _amourettes à la limousin_ were quite edible.' 

Robbie snorted, a noise pitched somewhere between ribaldry and disgust. Ralph decided not to ask. 

'Anyway,' Foley continued. 'It didn’t sell before the war, so I don’t see anyone hurrying to buy it now, unless for a nursing home or something. Quite fitting, maybe, that the ugly pile should end up filled with fools, maimed and blind.’ 

Ralph dispensed his standard-issue _nice try, dearie_ look. To his surprise, Foley took it up. 

‘Don’t be so bloody touchy. I meant my lot.’ 

‘I know you did,’ Ralph said sweetly. ‘Why don’t you tell me about them?’ 

Proud wasn’t quite the word. He took a savage, puerile glee in the machinations of his ancestor Fabian, which had developed from mere insurance fraud into something more unhinged and sinister, but just as much in Fabian’s suicide when a mob of fishermen—enraged by a drowning that was not, strictly speaking, anything to do with his dubious schemes—finally came for him. 

‘Sounds like a lot of people I used to know,’ Ralph said. ‘They thought saying fuck you to the law was enough.’ 

‘Enough for what?’ 

‘Enough to make them glamorously rebellious. Enough to put them in the right because the law is cruel. I don’t care for it. It’s complacent. We all have to make out as human beings, and that means not letting people off their responsibilities, but we have to be responsible for one another as well. “We must love one another or die.” ’ That was ill-advised; the poem was a favourite of Laurie’s, and his voice cracked. But Foley didn’t seem to recognise the quotation, and the wind was soughing around the platform stiffly enough to snatch anyone’s breath. 

‘Really? Can’t see you as an _espirit de corps_ merchant, somehow. I think you’re as much of an individualist as I am.’ 

‘And look where that got us.’ Robbie spoke in an iteration of the steady, tolerant tone he used to say harsh things to Jake; it had desire and desperation in it, Ralph thought, where the other had warmth and liking. 

‘Can’t think what you mean. Wasn’t that what the last lot was all about, the rights of the individual against the corporatist jackboot? What was it your poet says we all want, Lanyon? “Not universal love/But to be loved alone.” Or is that just ballet dancers?’ 

An appreciatively chilly part of Ralph’s consciousness wished he’d seen his own face at the point of impact. Foley mightn’t be the calculating type, exactly, but he had a sharkish instinct for blood. 

Robbie said, ‘I didn’t mean political abstractions, Lewis. Or poetic ones. I meant twenty-four dead men.’ 

‘Don’t bring that up, Rob.’ The platform swayed beneath them. 

‘I think it’s relevant to the discussion, don’t you?’ 

‘Well, what if I had done it by the book? Just gone for the listening post? More people would have died. That fucker was torturing—hanging civilians in reprisal—’ 

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lew. The lies you tell yourself. I wouldn’t mind so much if you hadn’t obliged us to tell them as well.’ 

Ralph’s first thought was _Foley’s left-handed. Didn’t spot that._ He didn’t, luckily enough, have a second thought; he sprang across the platform and caught Robbie under the arms at the very moment Robbie loosened Foley's grip on his neck sufficiently to slide under the rail. Ralph suspected he’d overdone it. Robbie might have been able to pull himself back; he was as lithe as an eel. Certainly the momentum hadn’t properly taken him; it was no strain to haul his spare frame to safety. 

Foley fell back slack and pale; Ralph had never seen a man so quick to deflate. He wondered if it obtained elsewhere too, and concluded charitably that it couldn’t possibly, though Robbie was just the sort to tolerate dissatisfaction for years on end. Foley leapt up abruptly and ran down the ladder to the roof. They heard the attic trapdoor heave to and slam shut. 

‘We do make a very indifferent Pietà, my dear,’ Robbie croaked, struggling to a sitting position. 

‘I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything quite so camp to me in my life. I didn’t go to Oxford, of course.’ 

Robbie started to laugh, and then to cough violently. 

‘Bloody hell. He meant it, didn’t he?’ Ralph said. 

Robbie got something of his breath back. ‘Only for about thirty seconds. Sometimes that’s more than enough, though.’ 

He crawled out of Ralph's arms. On hands and knees, he wheezed briefly, then clambered to his feet. 

'All right?' 

Ralph squeezed his shoulder. Robbie turned his head with a mad bright grin, but his dark eyes were troubled and imploring. But for their exposed situation, Ralph would have kissed him. 

'By the way,' Ralph asked. 'What are amourettes á la—'

'Sheep's balls.' 

They descended through the house to the studied indifference of the help. Lewis Foley stalking about in white-faced rage and shock probably wasn’t news to anyone here, Ralph reflected. Lewis had taken his car, and rather than wait for the bus they walked back to Oldport. Robbie explained the cause of their quarrel: a fairly small-scale, though risky, raid in Salerno. Foley had over-reached his orders trying to capture a notorious enemy officer (in which he succeeded) and involved his unit in a battle which left eighteen of them dead on the spot and six injured so badly that they could not be evacuated. The prisoner died a week later of wounds sustained, having never been conscious for long enough to do more than confirm his identity. 

‘Lewis might have been able to finesse his way out of it a bit easier had he not forgotten the bread-and-butter mission, which was to take and silence the listening post.’ 

‘ _Forgotten_?’ 

‘Yes, that’s what I’d have said if I didn’t know him. I think he really did: he’d fixed on getting hold of the commandant and the samples, and the actual object of the raid just receded into insignificance.’ 

‘And he put pressure on you to cover it up?’ 

‘Oh no. I shouldn’t have said _obliged_ , should I? Maybe that’s what set him off. No, Lewis would never be so crude as to apply anything one could call pressure. Even when we were kids—he’d involve you up to your eyes in the most unthinkable mischief—remind me to tell you about Lord Alconleigh and the sugar in the petrol some time—and then sit back and watch you make up your mind if you were going to rat or not. He enjoyed that bit. I squealed on him— _once_. I think we were about nine at the time. It was his first holiday from prep school, anyway.’ 

‘So he beat the crap out of you?’ 

‘Just the opposite. He never thanked you for keeping mum, and he never bore any malice if you didn’t. I felt such a _traitor_ ; it was worse than any amount of punishment.’ 

‘If I may say so, Robbie, it’s probably not the sort of thing one should carry into adult life.’ 

‘The thought has occurred to me once or twice, you know.’ He used his wry, tolerant voice; Ralph heard the sweet tone of fondness in it, and his guts twisted. ‘But as we got older it just got more entrenched. _For they would refrain from everything shameful, rivalling one another in honour; and men like these, fighting at one another’s side, might well conquer the world._ You see, don’t you, Ralph?’ 

‘Oh yes, my dear, I see.’ He wished he could say what he thought of a man who would use _that_ , of all things, to manipulate his way out of responsibility for a small bloodbath. He ventured, ‘He had his end to keep up, though, too. Not to do anything shameful.’ 

‘He was quite ready to own up. I convinced him that one more bloody little sideshow could be hidden in plain sight, and worked out how we’d do it. I’m as guilty as he is. More so. I talked him into it.’ 

_No you didn’t_ , Ralph thought, _the bastard had you hooked like a cod from the start_. He saw in the miserable clamp of Robbie’s jaw that he knew it too, and that it didn’t change a thing. 

Robbie didn’t take the _Golden Enterprise_ out that night. They sat in the cabin and drained the stock of brandy, this having, they agreed, some of the lineaments of an emergency, and tenderly breached their mutual physical reserve. The mental blockade stayed good. Robbie was deft and thoughtful; nearly all his refinements tending to promote the delay that Ralph was all too capable of effecting in himself. 

Ralph wrote: _obvs wh one articulates it, but xt how much grubbier it feels to be someone’s 2nd than his 20th, or 200th._ And then he crossed it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Ralph quotes is 'September 1, 1939', which also supplies the chapter title.


	4. Some moorings

It was a fairly grisly winter. The Byfleet station expected layoffs, but none came, though everyone shared the misery of being never quite warm and always not exactly hungry. Ralph’s left hand chapped painfully along the old wounds, as it had at sea; for a while he wore the glove again (the first time he did so the postroom boy turned paper-white and nearly showed a sole).

Jake Anquetil fell ill in January; at first Robbie cared for him at home, but in the savage February freeze he was taken to hospital, from whence it seemed unlikely he would leave a vertical man, but he hung creakingly on. Ralph went to Pharos Cottage every evening he could manage; tried never to do so without bringing something: food, drink, kerosene, candles, a bale of wood or sack of small coal. The cottage was a spartan place to sit out living memory’s coldest winter: brick-flagged floors downstairs, bare boards above. The parlour contained about twice as much furniture as did the kitchen and two bedrooms put together, all of it cheap, ugly and impractical. Ralph joked that if it was up to him it would have been used to ameliorate the fuel crisis weeks ago: for a moment his eyes met Robbie’s across a social gulf as wide as any in England. Ralph’s contacts had been unconventional, but such extremes of respectable poverty had lain outside his direct experience until now: how strange it must have been to grow up suspended between this, a kind of clean squalor, and the maverick sprezzatura of the Foleys. In the blackout conditions wrought by electricity cuts, Ralph made his worst gaffes, the ones that came gibbering back to him at waking moments in the night and idle ones in the day: offering a casual hand out of the armchair or up the stairs, hypnagogically murmuring _Spud_ into the back of Robbie’s neck. He resented Robbie’s patient tolerance of them. The pleasures he took when Robbie dropped easily to his knees seemed faintly treacherous; never enough to ask him to not to (even if such a request might be tactfully phrased) but always enough to pollute the experience. 

In March Ralph transferred to Farrant and more engaging employment. It was all-but nine-to-five—a novelty to him. He’d more or less resigned himself to being shorebound for the foreseeable future. He had more technical work do than before, fixing hitches in a new system, then training personnel to it. He excelled at that, found confidence in his colleagues’ good opinion and regard. He saw Robbie at weekends, cut himself a bit of slack sometimes and dropped into one of the town’s handful of talkative pubs. He was beginning to think he could live like this: it was half a life, but he’d never really had more than that. He refused to lie to himself; with Laurie there had been a glimpse of more, but the war, and a deeper incompatibility, had scuppered it. _Happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long_ , he thought, but now there was some curious solace in the reflection. 

Contrary to the last, Jake survived until the snows had melted and the floods nearly subsided, only to die on the last day of March. With his usual half-truths and evasions, Ralph blagged his way into a day off at short notice, and with some strange thought of propriety born of a crape armband took the slow and stopping bus to Oldport rather than hitching. He did obsequies moderately well—extensive previous experience being largely identical with good references in this department—but he was rattled nonetheless to find both the corpse and Lewis Foley in the overstuffed parlour. Ralph hoped vainly that his startlement at finding the former with a rosary twined in its fingers had not been evident to the latter. A muddled idea of the prejudices of Jamaican schoolmistresses, to which Ralph brought a few extra of his own, had led him to assume Jake of Huguenot stock. Robbie never spoke of religion. 

Foley stood up from the straight-backed chair and greeted Ralph as if they were both family. Robbie smiled in relief—he couldn’t, Ralph thought incredulously, have been convinced by that little display, but in Foley’s presence he let go most of his judgement—and went through to the kitchen to oversee the preparations there. He had the automatic look of grief postponed until the practicalities were seen to; by the time they were, grieving would seem belated and immoderate, and would never occur. Still, it was not new to him and he was not alone in it: there must be few people indeed to whom the war had not given a parcel of deaths never mourned, guilt never expiated. But even Robbie’s capacity was not infinite, and Ralph realised, almost without considering the matter, that he had resolved to be there when, finally, it was exceeded. 

Foley offered whisky from the bottle at his feet. Ralph hesitated. Refusal meant a long interval of sobriety since the drink was clearly Foley’s gift, and in his gift too. 

‘No thanks, Lewis.’ 

‘Quite sure? It’ll be a long day of ordinary folk and platitudes.’ The rebuff, Ralph saw with dismay, had amused him. He saw himself as Lewis must, a terrier guarding with comic ferocity what Lewis, an absentee landlord, held in fee simple. The blow to his _amour propre_ acted on him (as usual) as a goad: if Lewis wanted him to glower and fret that was the last damn thing he was going to do. 

‘I actually like the local people, believe it or not. Go on then.’ He accepted the glass and launched into predictable, loose-ended narrative, which lasted until the undertakers arrived. 

Considering the distance to the Catholic church, there were a fair few people prepared to expend the petrol; Ralph sensed rather to demonstrate their fondness for Robert than grief for the old man. It was part of Robbie’s appeal, of course, that he steadily refused the power that came with others’ trust of and faith in him. He did not even exploit the subtler sway that such refusal lends. Had he Robbie’s gifts, Ralph knew he could not have done the same—he could not do the same even with his more modest talents. And Lewis, with less than either of them, recognised no scruple whatsoever. 

It was disagreeable to see Foley following the coffin, but Ralph was fascinated despite himself: never an exhibiting movement, thin, mobile, wind-tanned face tuned to exactly the right note of democratic condescension, the hand on Robbie’s shoulder exemplifying a sternly Platonic love. If it been anyone but Foley, Ralph would have been moved, possibly to a degree incompatible with his six months’ acquaintance with the deceased, so it was just as well that it was him after all. Back at the house, too, you would have thought a bellowed conversation with Fred Trouncer or a painfully genteel one with Jeannie Fawcett was just what Lewis had been hoping for all year. The mourners being mostly without employment, the scanty collation of tea, bloater-paste sandwiches and eggless sponge-cake seemed to go on for an age, but finally, only the three of them and the two women who’d come to help in the kitchen were left; these latter expelled Robbie from their temporary fiefdom with tea-towel-ends and remarks about the over-particular habits of seafaring men. 

‘Yes, Rob, leave them to it. Come in here and have a dram before Lanyon inhales it all.’ 

They had been getting on for some curious value of _well_ in the quarter-hour since the last mourners left. Ralph did not doubt that Foley might turn nasty at any time, but a certain immunity to his charm made its manoeuvres rather compelling. Ralph, for his part, found himself assuming postures he thought abandoned for a decade or more: something like the virtue-of-necessity routine he’d gone in for at school, and was surprised to find it worked as well as it had then. Having no advantage of money or birth even by the modest standards of a _good_ school, he set a fashion, first among his peers, and then as he grew in age and influence, through the House and School, for a sort of citizenly austerity, more notional Athens than sans-culottes. It was a broad church, able to subsume and flatten most schoolboy affectations, and it chimed with the mood outside the microcosm. It was probably the best thing he’d ever done; certainly the most self-conscious. And he’d hashed it all for a few tawdry fucks among papier-maché cuirasses and cardboard battlements. Of course, it hadn’t seemed like that at the time. He’d even evolved a high-sounding justification for taking what he could get instead of asking for what he desired and feared would be refused him. It had all been of a piece, until he’d put down the slipper, mouthing some beastly commonplace, and seen Hazell’s abject, elated face. He wondered what Robbie had been like at his grammar school. 

‘Thank you,’ Robbie was saying to Lewis, ‘will you stay the night?’ 

‘Good God, no. I wouldn’t—’ 

‘Why, should you hate it?’ 

‘I hadn’t thought—I have thirty-six hours leave.’ 

‘You can stay if you like, Lew. We must talk about—’ he shrugged a _this place_. 

‘Absolutely not. Not _today_. I think Father will want you to remain—as long as you need to, anyway. If you should like me to stay, of course I shall.’ 

‘Yes, please do. You shouldn’t drive with that much whisky on board, anyway.’ 

Overtaken by a yawn, Robbie stretched. Ralph bit the inside of his lip and struggled through some of the desultory talk that followed, so as not to seem to bolt. As soon as he was on his feet, knew he’d failed. Lewis’s mild look didn’t contain so much as an atom of triumph; he had not, after all, won anything. 

Robbie intercepted him just outside the kitchen door, coming back from the yard. 

‘I’m not going to try to keep the cottage, Ralph.’ 

‘You’d be a fool not to, with the housing shortage. Of course, you’ll need to get a lodger now.’ 

Robbie flinched. While Ralph had certainly meant it, not being a plaster saint, of which he’d already seen about two dozen too many today, he hadn’t meant it to come out wearing quite as much eyeshadow as all that. 

‘I’m taking applications from as far away as Farrant.’ 

‘Don’t, Robbie. I mean, it’s all right. No-one’s cent per cent all the damn time. Sometimes you just have to admit that it’s not what you’d like to feel but it’s what you feel. And anyone who loves—’ 

Mrs Carter and Mrs Moxon came out of the back door, tying on headscarves. 

‘All right, Mr Bob—’ 

‘Mr _Anquetil_ —’ added Mrs Moxon, who had an idea of primogeniture. 

‘Mmm, all right. We’re finished in there. You take care of yourself. I’ll be round with your dinner tomorrow.’ 

‘Thanks, Mrs Carter. There’s no call for you to be so kind, you know, but thanks. Did you take what you need for it from the cupboard?’ 

‘You know I wish I didn’t have to. I don’t know, mustn’t grumble, but I thought things were supposed to get _better_ after the war.’ 

Robbie took a step towards her and clasped her hand between his. ‘It means a very great deal that you look after me like this. Give my regards to Elsie, and tell Olwen fifteen’s not too old to run away to sea, I’ll expect her—and thank you, Mrs Moxon.’ 

That night Ralph volunteered for the winged chair by the kitchen range and dozed under an enormous carriage-rug, wishing there’d been enough drink to knock him cold and trying to forget the empty room upstairs. 

At about five a.m. Robbie came down to the kitchen. He was wearing the canvas trousers he had on the day they’d met in the Arms. He squatted on the rag-rug at Ralph’s feet, a posture which reminded him of the old women who chewed betel and gambled on the stoops in Singapore. 

Ralph flicked a corner of the blanket towards him. ‘You’ll freeze.’ 

Robbie curled into it against Ralph’s legs; he reached out to stroke the back of Robbie’s neck and bare shoulders. 

‘I’m sorry, Ralph.’ 

‘What on earth for? Like I said, it’s all right. Sometimes you’ve got all the valves screwed down and the gauge bursts. It’s happened to me. No-one who—cares for you can resent that.’ 

‘Lewis—’ 

Ralph suppressed _Lewis doesn’t care for you_ , it being, among other things, possibly untrue. 

‘It’s unhealthy,’ Robbie continued, ‘I know that. But I mean, I owe them everything. You must have guessed. The peppercorn rent was in return for letting me stay at school. There was a sort of stipend, too, until I went down from Oxford. But you can’t, not forever. I want to break myself of it.’ 

‘Cutting the apron-strings just in time?’ 

Robbie laughed. ‘We—I mean, I don’t think the standard psychoanalytic account applies. His mother is still alive, you know. She lives in Gozo as Mrs André O’Connell. Lewis says he doesn’t remember her. I do, though. Just as a scent of violets, a blue cashmere bosom and a sort of air of heartening kindness, but that quite clearly. It must have been a village fête or something.’ 

Ralph had nothing to say about mothers. He replied with a caress meant to communicate gently amused reassurance. Caresses being one of his accomplishments, it did so a little more effectively than he meant; Robbie groaned, arched his back, and let his head fall into Ralph’s lap. 

‘Look, anyway,' Robbie said eventually. 'I can practically live aboard the _Golden Enterprise_. A room in a boarding-house would do me. And I thought maybe we—’ 

‘Yes, naturally. I had thought of it too, you know. We’ll fix something up. Go back to—to bed.’ Ralph bent to kiss him. 

There being little point in trying to sleep after that, he tidied himself as best he could, and left quietly. Having no time to return to his digs, he hitched to Farrant and went straight in to work, where the relaxation in personal standards was noticed, and remarks passed to the effect that you’d never think Lanyon the type to take a family loss so hard. You didn’t really think of him having relatives at all. 

That evening, he found a letter on the hall-stand, addressed in Alec’s looping, ludicrously legible hand. Ralph had a distinct intimation of its contents, and there it was, among unprintable medical apocrypha and scabrous but unprurient gossip: _Lockhart appears to have decided he was just fastidious all along_. And Laurie's new address, on the edge of Bloomsbury.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is from 'To the Harbormaster'.


	5. The various envies

It was Alec he went to see. They met in a Soho pub long familiar to both of them, to which amateur attempts at interior design coupled with the regular clientele lent the inadvertent but lasting impression of the Inferno’s vestibule. Alec had emerged from a youthful skirmish with good looks rather craggy and beaky, his dark hair already spattered with grey—nurses no doubt said _distinguished_. Until now, anyway, he’d never wanted for full-time passengers, though he never quite _wanted_ them either. He just always _had_ them. Perhaps that was the problem.

His affair with Sandy Reid had eventually gone west for a Canadian airman of conspicuous guilelessness and Grecian beauty, whereupon—Ralph’s incredulity momentarily overcoming courtesy—Alec had murmured, ‘Oh Sandy has something, all right,’ and then sank into nicotinous reflection. It was odd to imagine Sandy pinkly ministering to the inhabitants of Halifax, Nova Scotia, especially if you had once found yourself at a loose end, wondering if you’d ever be dry-shod again and happy to go to your grave before setting eyes on another clam, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but there it was; Sandy had emigrated earlier that year. There had been somebody during Alec’s houseman year, then that lugubrious, violent pathologist with the weak chest and a terrible complex about being a bastard, as if a bunch of queers in a bombed-out port during the most uncertain year of the war could be persuaded to care about anyone’s paternity—and then someone else, whose leaves had never coincided with Ralph’s visits, and who might, if he thought about it, actually have been two people, successive or simultaneous. But now, no-one. 

Alec lit a cigarette. ‘What an absolutely ridiculous snarl-up, my dear. I am sorry for my part in it, truly.’ 

‘Don’t talk crap. We got all that out of the way at the time.’ 

‘You should go and see him, you know. He needs someone up to his own—I’ve said all this before, likely with quotations from Lawrence T.E., and D.H., if I was tight. Sorry about that. You know what I mean.’ 

‘I would if I could. I don’t have any hard feelings. I saw it was what had to happen. But I can’t.’ 

‘Oh hell, there’s somebody, isn’t there?’ 

Ralph nodded. 

‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken?’ said Alec brightly. 

‘I think I may be. But it doesn’t change anything. Before you worry, he’s not another Bunny.’ 

‘No, it’s worse than that, isn’t it? He’s another you.’ 

‘No. I don’t know. I could do with getting utterly fucking rat-arsed, tell you the truth.’ 

‘Then that is exactly what we shall do.’ 

Ralph woke on Alec’s divan beneath a tartan rug bearing a label from Alex Scott  & Co., Aberdeen, less his shoes, shirt, vest and one sock, but otherwise fully dressed. He felt quite well. Then he sat up. 

‘Good morning,' Alec said, in a slight burlesque of his genuine bedside manner. 'You look a bit cheap. Coffee? I have the real thing.’ 

‘Oh Christ, yes.’ 

Alec’s method, involving condensed milk and a saucepan, always looked terrifically unlikely, but it worked, producing a stiff, invigorating alluvium. He handed Ralph a tastefully bucolic earthenware mug of it and sat on the divan beside him. 

‘Since you _won’t_ ask, your inhibitions stayed good. You tipped rather a lot of rum down your bib, that’s all. I’ll lend you a shirt.’ 

Having already cut short their weekend, Ralph had arranged with Robbie to go directly to Oldport; the wires settling these plans had been their only communication since the funeral. Not all the laconism in Sparta could be adequate to showing up with cuffs grazing his knuckles and a former lover’s laundry mark in his collar. He set down the mug. 

‘Come here a moment...’ 

Alec caught his breath. ‘Bloody hell. Now? Are you sure?’ 

‘Bloke once told me it was a hangover cure. Medical student.’ 

‘He might, if he was worth his salt, have indicated that moderate to vigorous sexual activity can produce an illusory sense of relief from alcoholic crapula, but really the only thing for it is time. And plenty of fluids.’ 

‘And I said if you can do it at all, it isn’t what I’d fucking well call a hangover.’ 

‘Well, do you have what you would call a hangover?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Oh Ralph. Forgive me if I don’t believe you.’ 

‘Does it matter?’ 

‘Losing a leg? Sorry, that was low. It matters if it’s going to make you feel a good deal worse afterwards.’ 

‘That’s my look-out, isn’t it?’ 

‘Ultimately, but—I can’t think why I’m trying to talk you out of this, actually.’ 

‘Then don’t, and come here.’ Ralph heard his voice strike its intimate, charming, too-experienced note of courtship. It couldn't possibly work. Not on Alec. 

But a little while later he was using another version of it, the assured and satisfied one, to ask, ‘Are you thinking about me?’ 

‘Yes. What a winsome little vanity of yours that is. Sure you want me to say?’ 

‘I did ask.’ 

‘You were feeling your way back into things. I felt rather like I’d just been recommissioned.’ 

‘Ah. I’d hoped not to communicate that, one way or another. The refit job was absolutely splendid, if that helps to know at all.’ 

He’d assumed the brisk tones of shop, and Alec snorted. ‘It has been nine years. Due an overhaul, don’t you think?’ 

‘Nine years. How young we were.’ 

‘ _You_ don’t seem a day older, dear.’ 

Ralph raised an eyebrow. ‘I was born close to my three score and ten, you mean? You wouldn’t be the first to say it. It’s not true, though. Look, this probably better not happen again.’ 

‘God no. The original one-off and no second thoughts. I’ll dig you up you that shirt: I think I have one shortish in the arm.’ 

Ralph noticed the threads of a clipped-out tag in the neck, and to cover his queasiness observed aloud that the laundry should have sacked whoever pressed for them long ago. 

At the door to the flat, Alec laid one hand on Ralph’s shoulder, and tilted his chin with the other for a long and tender kiss. ‘Please go and see him, Ralph. I’m not fool enough to ask you to swear, because—’ 

‘Matthew 5:37?’ 

‘Is that one of those signal things?’ 

‘Not exactly. I’ll write to him, how’s that?’ 

‘Better than nothing, I suppose. Go on. You’ll have to sprint as it is.’ 

He wrote, getting the personal stuff out of the way in an awkward first page that he dared not re-read for fear of squandering paper to almost certain disimprovement of content and style, and then filling a couple more with anecdote and information. He hesitated over the closing phrase, for there could be no escalation of affection from whatever he decided upon, but _yours ever_ in response to his _love_ would be more crushing than he cared to contemplate. What the hell, he thought, it was sincere, at least he’d find out, and scored in the single word. 

He expected an interval that he would attribute first to calculation, then, more painfully, to inattention, but there was none. 

> My dear Ralph,
> 
> Thanks for your letter. I’ll imitate your own invariable (and endearing) practice and dispense with the private business first. I suppose Alec gave you my new address; do please thank him. He gave me yours too, but though I flattered myself that there were perhaps as many as four people in the world from whom you should like less to receive a letter, that seemed insufficient reason to set pen to whatever you call this porous muck, because it’s surely not quite writing-paper (please excuse it). Of course I was just being cowardly, as I realised the moment I saw yours on the hall table this morning. I coined fine phrases all day, each of them counterfeit, and they have in any case deserted me. ‘I must lie down’ (I am, in my usual posture for pleasure-class letter-writing) ‘where all the ladders start.’
> 
> It struck me that this is the first consequential letter I have written you that is not liable to be opened and read by a third party, and a terrible sense of constraint descended, still to lift. I feel, now they are no longer necessary, the absurd appeal of our circus of imaginary friends, the menagerie of symbolical animals. They gave us things to say. That means, I think, that sometimes we had nothing to say. For old times’ sake, then: I saw a kestrel hunting above the rec. this morning. How singular its flight is; however often you see it you feel still a buckling jolt, not unlike its own as it faces the headwind.

Ralph caught his breath: it had been their wartime cypher for a particularly energetic expression of physical desire, one deployed seldom and cherished intensely in the imagination for days, even weeks. Typical Spud, never passing up an opportunity to be provoking.

> I was glad to hear your news, my dear. Robert sounds like a man so much in your own mould that had I not absolutely trusted that the factory broke it after the special edition of 1914 I should suspect industrial espionage. I wish you every happiness. Believe me in this.  
> 

He was beginning to get a bit irked with people who’d never set eyes on Robbie queuing up to tell him how alike they were. Any resemblance was entirely superficial.

> As for me, there’s not much to say. The operation last autumn was a success and my leg’s about the best it’s ever been. Coming off the pills has been no bloody joke, though. Do you remember saying you wouldn’t tell me the name, because they were addictive and I was chronic? How wise you were, always were. The job I do is agreeable enough: I have no idea what convinced the Alice Prosser Trust that I am a suitable person to impose sense and order upon its archive, a lunatic collection encompassing everything from the sixteenth-century logs of Devonshire farmhouses to black-letter broadsides to the account-books of Edwardian provincial repertory companies—single-handed and untrained. It is proposed to remedy the latter in the only manner known to bureaucracy: viz. they’re going to send me on a fucking course. In the meantime, I muddle along gently, doing as little as possible and trying not to break things or start fires.
> 
> I was in a pub on Great Portland Street the other night and— 

The rest was anecdote, commentary on a concert heard, a well-judged name-drop or two. It was signed _with much love, Laurie_. 

That night Ralph dreamt vividly and directly of a man who’d been dead for seven years; it turned into one of the bad ones: the smoke, the corpses, the screaming wounded, the _silent_ wounded, the no-hopers who’d inhaled and swallowed too much fuel oil to live but took an age of agony to die, the oil itself worst of all, clothes saturated, skin slick with it, all of it taking place not at sea but on a—his waking mind would find as his dreaming one could not, the technical term— _sound stage_. He woke choking in a sump of sweat. He thought of the words Alec used to talk about dreams: _displacement, condensation_ , and his own well-worn riposte: _It’s no good, dear, I just think of bathtubs and damp bedsitters._

He gauged what he might courteously tell Robbie about his correspondence with Laurie, and spilled it over coffee (the last of Alec’s parting gift; it would be back to Camp with the next cup) in Pharos Cottage the next Saturday morning. 

‘I didn’t know you hadn’t been in touch all this time, actually.’ 

‘Don’t you think I’d have said, if I were?’ 

‘I don’t know. I didn’t think. You live your own life to a certain extent. I mean, one does.’ 

‘Do _you_?’ 

‘You know everything there is to know. In fact, you were more or less _there_.’ 

Ralph thought of a story he’d once heard of a man who quite deliberately made small social errors and hurtful comments, simply for the self-abasing pleasure of making a gracious and gentleman-like apology—telling Robbie about last weekend with Alec would fall, he considered, roughly into that category. 

‘Lewis—’ Robbie added with a wince, ‘asked if I thought you’d like to be a bit more so. I didn’t think you’d take that too well.’ 

‘You’re right,’ Ralph said, though the image of Foley on his hands and knees between them did not, shamefully, fail to arise. ‘Robbie, look. It’s all right. You don’t have to keep up standards for two people any more.’ 

Ralph reflected that this was not quite true; his own were on the skids in every department of life but the professional—and then he saw Robbie’s utter stillness. It lasted only a second or two, then he said, with a crisp distaste honed on the ordinary sordidness of Defaulters, ‘Neither do you. Don’t waste your time or mine trying.’ 

Because the need to be useful and necessary was intrinsic to him, Ralph usually found the spectacle of men engaged in the defence of others’ honour ludicrous. He knew the impulse well enough; he’d actually acted on it only once, to his satisfaction and the other party’s broken ribs and severe concussion. But that had been part of a desire for self-immolation he must now abjure. He understood this very soon after it happened, perhaps before he saw anything else very clearly. 

Laurie’s fits of high-mindedness had been verbose in exposition and obstinate in duration, but until the last susceptible to coaxing patience, wry counsel and a good hard fuck; the calculation had lain chiefly in working out in which order these should be administered. Robbie was not so negotiable. He could take a lot of insult without apparent injury before there would be a moment of recalibration such as Ralph had just provoked; but it was a mere resetting of the counter to zero: nothing truly changed. Ralph wanted to tell him to stop poisoning himself in this awful piecemeal way, or at least that when it came to a crisis he would be there to offer what antidote he could. It hardly followed from Robbie’s expression of contempt, though, so he took and lit a cigarette and drawled mildly, ‘Never even crossed my mind.’ 

It occurred to him as he said it, in a dangerous, lunatic intuition, that Robbie might have tolerances, as well as inflexibilities, where Laurie lacked them. 

‘What?’ Robbie asked. 

‘I don’t know what. What?’ 

‘You were smiling. One of your peculiar ones.’ 

‘I was thinking about you. Your attitude to discipline. Whether you were the sort to make men feel really sick about themselves or just squirm rather deliciously.’ 

Ralph had thought when he said it that it was worth the risk, that he could stand to lose whatever small stake he had invested here. He realised in the long seconds that followed that if a mite, it was nonetheless all he had, and that he could not. He had very nearly concluded that Robbie had not understood―and could only hope the incomprehension was not strategic―when he finally said, ‘Depends very much on the man, I imagine. Why? Should you like to find out?’ 

‘Yes, I would.’ 

All trace of amicability departed Robbie’s face, leaving a stern mask that resembled, more closely than any expression of his Ralph had ever seen before, the photograph of an statuesque Edwardian schoolmarm on the parlour mantelpiece. Ralph was about to call the whole thing off when he realised this was part of it. 

‘Put out that cigarette, Lanyon, and wipe that insolent smirk off your chops. I want you upstairs, stripped to the buff and holding your ankles.’ 

Ralph’s excitement sought premature release in laughter; he found that the deep breath he took to control it aggravated his arousal almost beyond bearing: it _hurt_ , a pain that could only be assuaged by more pain. He started to rise. 

‘Not yet,’ Robbie said, on a bright note of inspiration that rather spoiled his Rhadamanthine imposture. ‘This evening. Give you some time to―reflect. We’ll say six. I mean, both the hour, and the number of cuts. To start with.’ 

It began a period of contentment that lasted for nearly a year. Refusing Ralph's help to the extent of concealing from him the exact date of the removal, Robbie vacated Pharos Cottage and sold the ugly furniture to a newly-opened boarding house on the Byfleet road, in which he also kept a room. Ralph applied his aptitude for discreetly exploiting networks to the task of finding a flat in Farrant, after some weeks securing lodgings that reminded Robbie of his Oxford set with an immediacy sufficient for a moment to displace tact. They never really lived there _together_ , Ralph was later to reflect. Except that the windowless cupboard which the landlord had the nerve to list as _2nd bedroom or study_ was simply the polite blind and not the fact of _Robbie's room_ , it rather resembled what he had seen of the intimate yet reserved arrangements of impecunious exhibitioners flung together by a mutual friend marrying or joining up. 

Foley had taken a job as an instructor in seamanship at Dartmouth; a post, Ralph considered, at once demeaning for an officer with his length of service and well in advance of Foley’s capacities, but nonetheless cannily chosen as a likely route to promotion in a squeezed peacetime service. He would exercise caprice and court popularity; subvert discipline and then turn martinet; Ralph pitied the cadets he taught, the ones who were keen on him most of all. And there would be plenty who were keen on him. Robbie conscientiously reported his meetings with Lewis; Ralph wished he _wouldn’t_ , but it meant that he was aware of the falling off in contact. Not enough of a saint to regret it, but seeing the pain it gave Robbie, he offered himself the more abjectly as anodyne.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from 'In Praise of Limestone'.


	6. Forms of vanity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: contains epic drink-driving, as well as all the usual period- and canon-typicals.

‘ _Isfahan_?’ Robbie clattered his knife in the marmalade jar in the distant hope of excavating the last of the ration. ‘God knows you’re overdue some glamour, my dear, though I thought the last lot had finally done for the Sir Walter Bullivant school of diplomacy.’

Ralph grinned. ‘It has. They send unqualified men who don’t speak a word of the lingo for completely different reasons these days. And anyway, they’re going to put me on―’ 

‘―a fucking course. Does that mean going up to London?’ 

‘Not immediately. Two days a week initial instruction―’ 

‘Eggs supplied, knit your own grandmother?’ 

‘Yes, I expect so. Then town for the more specialist stuff. Shipping out in May. The contract’s for a year, five weeks home leave, passage paid. How do you feel about me taking it?’ 

Robbie looked startled and puzzled, as if he had never been asked a question of this sort before. ‘Me? I’ll miss you, naturally. But of course you must go. I’ll still be here when you get back. If you want that.’ 

‘Christ, Robbie. How could you doubt it?’ He reached across the table for Robbie’s right hand. ‘But―you?’ 

‘It’s over and done with. I haven’t met him in months and I don’t want to again.’ Despite the warm, caressing reassurance of Robbie’s cracked palm, Ralph doubted the veracity of this assertion. 

‘You see, I might. The part of the course that’s down here is in Dartmouth. Not the Ship. Some schoolroom in town.’ 

‘Oh. Well, if you see him, say hullo.’ Robbie withdrew his hand, closing the conversation. After they had washed up the breakfast things―neither of them being able to enjoy anything else while dirty dishes remained in the sink―Ralph set about making both of them forget Lewis Foley with a sedulous will. For moments at a time, he perhaps even succeeded. 

* 

The course had two regular instructors. The first, Wachowski, handsome, pale-eyed and conceited, had ascertained within half an hour of meeting them that his fourteen pupils had experience, theoretical knowledge or both to equal his own, and settled to interminable narrative concerning his discomfiture of superiors and conquest of the fair. Ralph organised his features into elaborate neutrality, and looked about him for the other one. A mirror or match in itself meant nothing, of course: it might just as easily signify serene and unquestioned membership of the majority; deviance was as likely to be found among the indecently enthusiastic or the visibly uncomfortable. But he didn’t care about that: he was looking for someone to go to the pub with, not to fuck, he had all he needed at home, and Warrington―no, Bootham―no, that wasn’t it either, hang it, he used to be good at names and faces, Lanyon was famous for names and faces, one bill-call and he had them all down, not just the promising ones but every identical little twirp on the register― _Wellingham_ , yes, Wellingham, looked like someone with whom one could have a drink. In all likelihood, incorrigibly normal; what did normal men do, Ralph wondered, with the time they saved in not having to make these continual calculations? Mental masturbation. Revenge fantasies. Literal masturbation. Nothing. Men are men, after all. Wellingham rocked in his chair like a tall, confident schoolboy, captain of the prep school Eleven. Ralph caught the corner of his eye; Wellingham made a quick, vivid moue at the stained and bulging ceiling. Maybe―no, Christ, he had all he needed at home, faithful Robert, faithful Robert whose heart had been pledged to another more than twenty years ago. 

At length Wachowski departed and the tea trolley came in. 

Wellingham instantly acquired an audience; slightly reluctantly, Ralph joined it, thinking perhaps he had been hasty in his sympathies; the man might be just a smart aleck. 

‘I think you’re a madman, Wellingham,’ a Ulster voice was saying. ‘Swapping a cushy wee number with sherry at six and High Table laid on, for this kip.’ 

‘Couple of months ago I would have agreed with you. Sillers―my old tutor, you know―gave me a perfect ballocking when I resigned the Fellowship. He’d pulled every string in the puppet show to get me demobbed early.’ 

He met Ralph’s gaze, which must have been unwittingly murderous, because Wellingham recoiled minutely, mastered himself, and continued, ‘I was quite simply bored out of my tiny mind. And I’m not even particularly deranged, by the standard. Friend of my brother’s was a parson―well, at any rate he’d been ordained, and then he chucked it to join up again as a private. He was a queer fish, Dallas, but I think our generation always will be―fidgety. Lacking the old certainties, but desperate for structure.’ 

Ralph could hardly gainsay that, and at that moment the other instructor entered. Conyngham was one of life’s unfortunates. His Liverpudlian whinge issued from a mouth too full of teeth, set in a spongy jaw that looked innocent of any shade of manhood. His timidity abetted his tendency to ineffectual tyranny; the class, like a big lazy dog that has had most of its natural energies petted out of it confronted with one positively sickly, smelly and puny, decided as a body to torment him. It was the sort of mob behaviour that Ralph usually stood against, but with the faultless instinct of a weak personality for self-sabotage, Conyngham had identified him as a particular enemy, to be alienated with feeble sarcasm and pedantry. That path to Ralph’s disesteem, travelled by more than one prep schoolmaster before Mr Jepson set his outsize trotters upon it, was, for all its relative breadth, a one way street. 

Low-grade skirmishes occupied the first forty-five minutes of the scheduled ninety, but it happened to be Ralph’s intransigence regarding the clutter likely to be encountered on a high-frequency signal transmitted from Prestwick in midwinter that finally provoked mayhem. He didn’t mean to do it, for all he disliked Conyngham: it was just that he knew something both about the country around the airfield and the practical physics of wireless transmission, obstinately factual subjects over which suave and face-saving revocation would have been difficult even if he’d cared to stoop to it. Within moments, farmyard noises and missiles of rapidly increasing gauge filled the air, Mr Chad materialised on the blackboard to bewail the absence of a nether portion of feminine anatomy, a game character of about five foot four and eight stone offered to demonstrate upon Wellingham, nine inches taller and half a hundredweight heavier, a series of pehlwani manoeuvres he’d learned while interrogating INA prisoners in Attock. Ralph reacted (at the time, unconsciously) to the unfolding disorder with the _mores_ which he had once believed those of the English public school, but which in fact existed only in its Platonic ideal, or perhaps in his imagination. Conyngham had been victimised, but he was not a victim; lacking authority, he had substituted authoritarianism, and the riot that was the result must be allowed its head: the only permissible intervention was to protect life and limb. Ralph stood up and perched on his desk, hands in pockets. The Irishman McCausland, accompanying himself on armpit, began to drone, ‘It was old but it was b―yootiful―’ 

At first nobody, not even Ralph, noticed that Conyngham’s reproofs and fruitless calls for attention had ceased, but gradually his silence rippled outward; reaching McCausland at roughly the same moment he did. 

‘―Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne,  
My father wore it as a youth, in the bygone days of yore,  
And so on the Twelfth I love to sport―’ 

No-one made a sound. McCausland stared up at the waxen-faced, tubby lecturer in defiant imbecility and pealed out, ‘The Sash my father worenosurrenderfuckthePope,’ punctuating this elevated sentiment with a last, tremendous oxter-fart. 

The slap sounded unreal, hollow, like a sound effect at a dress rehearsal. McCausland sat stunned for a half-second, his ruddy complexion drained where Conyngham’s palm had made contact. He recovered and jumped up with a bellow, but as he withdrew his hand his wristwatch caught on the placket of his shirt, giving Conyngham time to make a moderately dignified escape. The panes in the door shivered dangerously behind him, while McCausland feinted convulsively at the idea of pursuing him with violence. Someone whistled marvellingly. 

‘Well that was certainly educational, though perhaps not quite in the sense that H.M.G. intended,’ Wellingham said. ‘Sit down, McCausland, you asked for it.’ 

Wellingham possessed an impersonal and authentic note of command; the Ulsterman subsided into fricatives. 

‘Opening time,’ Ralph proposed, ‘is in ten minutes.’ 

A few of them―Wellingham, the would-be wrestler Maxwell, McCausland (who had decided, somewhat embarrassingly, to be a sport), a man called Peters, chippily self-conscious of his Black Country accent―ended up in a sticky, asymmetrical little hole aptly named the Polychrest, its walls covered with pictures of corvettes and destroyers in home-made frames. Ralph noticed with mild dismay that it had a small specialist clientele. Unmistakable to his eye, the group was, he hoped, subdued enough to be invisible to the rest. This aspiration received a substantial blow when he turned from the bar again, bearing two pint mugs and a short, to see Lewis Foley ensconced in the middle of it. The man must be mad to keep company like that, only a stone's throw from where he held a position _in loco parentis_ , but then―he thought of Fireweed, of the fishing fleet coming for Fabian, of Sir Humphrey and his Folly―Foley _was_ mad. He acknowledged him with a nod and a tight smile. Foley touched the forearm of his nearest companion and spoke behind an ostentatious hand before getting up. 

His sashay across the hacked, sloping floor roused all of Ralph’s worst fears, but Foley, nothing if not unpredictable, modified his gait into unexceptionable masculinity a mere half second before he came into the others’ sightlines. Introduced to them, he was charm itself: he talked Oxford with Wellingham and the Punjab with Maxwell, allowed Peters to impress him with civil engineering, and had something to say about Bushmills, McCausland’s native place, that did not refer merely to its proximity to the Giant’s Causeway. Ralph saw for the first time what Robbie had seen all his life, and hated Foley all the more for not being quite able to hate him enough. 

The barman rang the bell. 

‘How sincere is that, Foley?’ asked Maxwell, with a look around their disreputable surroundings. 

‘Not in the slightest, if Bert knows you by name and sight. Which he does me and my lot, and I think very likely you’re one of that august company too, Lanyon?’ 

It was the first hint of bitchery, and cheered by a couple of pints, Ralph was inclined to let it slide. ‘This is only the second time I’ve been here, I think. But don’t you have your boys to get back to?’ 

Foley craned around to his former table. ’They’re gone―oh, you mean the cadets? No, half-hol.’ 

‘I’d better not mitch,’ said McCausland, looking ruefully into the fumes of his chaser. ‘It’s not―’ he glanced at Wellingham, ‘playing up and playing the game, is it?’ 

Wellingham raised his eyes to the smoke-stained beams, amused at the primitive attempt at a jibe. ‘Well, we shouldn’t give that frightful little tick the impression it _is_ a game, I suppose.’ 

‘Frightful little―?’ Foley asked, with one of his attractive smiles. 

‘ _Ti―me, ple―ase!_ ’ Bert shouted over the bell. 

‘One of the instructors,’ Ralph said shortly. ‘I don’t give a toss about games or impressions. I’m not going back.’ 

‘The missus’ll murder me if I spend all afternoon in the boozer,’ Peters said. ‘I’ve got the car, Max, if you want a lift.’ 

Maxwell assented with a shrug. 

‘Well, that settles things,’ Wellingham said easily. ‘Thanks awfully, McCausland.’ 

‘For wha―ah, fuck.’ 

‘Good of you to volunteer to be our―well, it’s sort of the opposite of a scapegoat, isn’t it? A prodigal lamb returning to the fold.’ 

Ralph’s inward grimace at the deliberately muddled allusion was replicated openly on McCausland’s coarsely good-looking face. He acknowledged himself in sympathy with the Ulsterman against Wellingham’s smug Established paganism; he supposed it was some mysterious, ancestral Dissenting kinship, which in turn led him to think of Andrew Raynes. Laurie had sometimes mentioned Raynes in his letters, once or twice with the sort of brutal tact that was the almost chemical product of a reaction between the manners learned at Mother’s knee and those inculcated in an English public school. But it never seemed to have coalesced into an affair proper: now an undergraduate in his second year at Oxford, Raynes had clearly awakened to himself, but Ralph couldn’t imagine an inflexible Quaker, however amicable, satisfying Laurie’s needs. He couldn’t―he thought this without self-conceit, as a mere matter of fact―really imagine anyone but himself satisfying them. That was what it truly meant, to let the black horse have its head: not blind lust, but an unshakeable physical bond with someone who was, in every other department of life, less compatible with you than any one of a dozen men you might name. He and Robbie were in the same precarious Carley raft, as far as that went―in it, or just clinging to the ratline? Foley’s long lashes and beguiling smile snapped back into sharp focus as their three departing companions―McCausland scowling satanically―got up. 

The Foley charm offensive continued throughout the lock-in. Eventually Ralph grew tired of mentally withdrawing whenever he caught himself having a good time, and relaxed. Six o’clock came round speedily after that, and though he had paced himself, when he got up to go to the lavatory, his sense of balance was somewhat conscious. 

‘Geoff here’s abandoning us, Lanyon,’ Foley said as he returned. Ralph wondered dimly when the move to Christian names had happened, and why he wasn’t included in it: it was a bad sign, he felt, for reasons not quite the usual ones. 

‘I’ve got to go too. I haven’t a car, and there’s only one bus after seven.’ 

‘To Port Wade? It goes from the stop just beyond the Ship, doesn’t it? I’ll drive you,’ Foley offered. Ralph hesitated: he was astonished to find something in him wanted exclusive proximity to Foley, and more than a little disgusted by it. 

It had rained while they were in the pub: the streets were greasy and a damp breeze blew some of the more unwholesome maritime smells inland. On reaching Foley’s Midget they tussled briefly with the hood in a way they would not have if wholly sober. On the passenger side was a flask and a waxed-paper packet. Ralph, who had lunched on a packet of Smith’s crisps and a handful of peanuts, realised he was ravenous. 

‘I expect they’re bloater paste. You’re welcome to them,’ Foley said, motioning for the flask. ‘Popular with gulls and gannets, anyway.’ 

He shoved the packet into the glove compartment, with the childish hope that Foley might forget about it until it started to stink. ‘I think you can still be fined ten pounds for that.’ 

Foley raised an eyebrow, as if he would rather enjoy his day in court, and opened the flask. Fastidiously, he poured out a measure of coffee into the cup-lid; it was real, and smelled divine, though it must be all but stone cold. He made a proffering noise. 

‘No thanks,’ Ralph replied. ‘You need it more.’ 

Foley gave another infuriating smile, and swilled it down. No cattiness could touch him: he simply lapped it up, creamily. He closed the flask again and wordlessly handed it over; Ralph had stowed it before he thought to resent the unspoken command. 

‘You’re obviously the Middle Eastern contingent,’ Foley said when they had got on their way. ‘But where are they sending you, exactly? Jeddah? Aden?’ 

Ralph felt a curious frisson of distrust. ‘Somewhere a bit more inland. You’re right about the petroleum connection.’ 

‘Oh, so very close-lipped. Just like our mutual friend.’ 

‘He says hullo.’ 

‘Does he? He never writes or telephones any more.’ It was impossible to gauge how ironic this pronouncement was. ‘His idea of fidelity, I suppose.’ 

‘Perhaps you should get in touch with him.’ Ralph thought he preferred shop talk, and seeing no great harm in it, added, ‘Iran, since you ask.’ 

‘Ah, yes. The wily and inscrutable Persian must at all costs be prevented from doing as Mr Attlee does, and taking his assets into national ownership.’ 

‘If Scotland had been occupied by the Reds during the war you might have a point,’ Ralph said stoutly. ‘It’s simply enlightened self-interest. The danger of them losing their heads and going Commie is just that much the greater.’ 

As they turned down onto the Townstall road a stir of sea-breeze blew a lock of Foley’s hair onto his forehead. Smoothing it into place with his left hand, he let his arm drop along the seat back. ‘What, the Jocks?’ 

If facetious, it was also timed well enough to be disarming. ‘Containment begins at home,’ Ralph conceded. 

Foley’s eyes flickered sideways and he grinned. ‘Here’s to the protection of the whisky reserves. Speaking of, I have the best part of a bottle of Macallan in my rooms. Come up for a―’ 

‘No,’ Ralph snapped, recoiling not so much from the offer as from his own readiness to accept. ‘My bus, remember?’ 

‘And your honour. I expect you were a prefect at school, weren’t you, Lanyon?’ 

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’ 

‘Don’t you? How curious. But you didn’t go to university?’ 

The ghastly thing was that Ralph's initial spike of animus was directed at Robbie: had he said something to Foley? Why _hadn’t_ he said something? It wasn’t as if Ralph hid it from any acquaintance who might be expected to understand. But Robbie’s standards were so much those of the larger world―it was absurd to be irritated at him for it, when it was just what drew Ralph to him. And yet irritated he was: somewhat unreasonably, he expected Robbie to be able to throw over his manners for those of the smaller, hidden society, just as he did himself. 

‘I expect I would’ve gone up, if I hadn’t been expelled.’ 

‘Oh, rough luck. I dodged the sack by a hair myself.’ A jerk of his thumb indicated that his alma mater was now his place of work. Ralph turned with a searching look, but Foley’s pleasant, unremarkable features were quite ingenuous. You could probably always divert him by getting him to talk about himself. ‘It’s rather a comic story, but we haven’t time―are you sure you won’t? It’s quite legit. to have a fellow as a guest, one just signs him in, and the housekeeper will make up a cot. You aren’t―’ 

With an understandable failure of imagination, Ralph pictured them warmly ensconced in a room rather like the sitting-room of Laurie’s former Oxford set, the fire on and tumblers of single malt in their hands. It certainly beat a gloomy bus-stop at dusk and the ninety-minute trundle of a journey that took a third as long by direct and private vehicle. His antipathy to Foley was not, after all, very high-minded: he wished he could say disinterestedly that the conduct of Fireweed was the cause of it, but Foley’s behaviour was exceptional for a death-or-glory Commando only in degree, not in kind; Robbie’s steadiness and caution were the more atypical. And he was basely curious: had Foley’s schoolboy offence been his own, but unproven, because Foley _had_ seen the use of lying in self-defence? Somehow he doubted it: Foley’s juvenile transgressions would surely have been more flamboyant, spectacular even, possibly involving outsiders―the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost of the public school system, but Foley had been spared, of course, for _style_. 

‘―you aren’t _expected_ at home, are you?’ Foley finished. 

Ralph came to his senses. That was the thing about Foley: he was safe because he always took it a little too far, was a trifle too obvious. Self-disgust would probably come later, but for now he was just relieved. 

‘Thank you very much, but―’ 

The car swerved alarmingly leftwards and a horn blared. Ralph had leisure to repent every time he had himself got behind the wheel with a few too many on board before he realised that they had pulled over without accident. 

‘Sell! Sell!’ Foley roared over his shoulder. For a moment Ralph could only think of the New York Stock Exchange floor, as represented at the flicks, tickertape montages and all that. ‘Selby!’ Foley amplified, and Ralph followed his gaze to see a small boy, his dark head down against a stiffish breeze, powering along at a jog that would soon abandon all pretence of dignity and become an exhausting, futile sprint. 

‘One of mine,’ Foley explained, ‘out on a pass with about six minutes to spare and a mile to go. You don’t mind, do you? Shuffle up,’ he said, with a conscious Lyceum intonation, ‘room for a littl’un.’ 

‘No,’ Ralph reached for the door handle. ’I’ll walk from here. It’s only a few hundred yards and I _do_ have time to kill.’ 

‘Oh!’ Foley exclaimed, as might an angler who had, for a deluded moment, allowed himself to think that a wily, century-old carp of the lake was at the end of his line. But the cadet caught them up before he could say more. He had a rather remarkable spherical head, like a nutcracker toy soldier. Scarlet-faced, he gasped, ‘Awfully―sure―sir―thank―sir―’ 

Ralph motioned him into the passenger seat with a smile, and closed the door behind him. Foley refused to meet Ralph’s eye, but his profile was a treat, an Easter Island statue mouthing jocosities to a pebble. 

Ralph raised his hand in farewell as the car drove away. Amid trivial satisfaction at having thwarted Foley’s design, he identified misgiving: he hoped the boy was proof against Foley’s sort of corruption, which was not the sordid, commonplace sort but something more insidious and seductive. He supposed he must have seen in the round, pink, puffing face better judgement of character, almost, than he possessed himself, otherwise he might have sat in the car at least to the college gate. With that distinctly sobering thought, he turned up his collar against a renewed spatter of rain, and set off for the bus stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: adapted from 'To the Harbormaster.'
> 
> Sir Walter Bullivant: Richard Hannay's Foreign Office contact in Buchan's thrillers. He prefers amateur intelligence agents.
> 
> Mr Chad: Kilroy (Was Here)'s British cousin, often accompanied by the slogan 'Wot, No [fill in the blank]?'
> 
> McCausland sings 'The Sash My Father Wore', a song associated with the Orange Order. Conyngham is a Catholic of Irish descent from Liverpool, for whom it would be an intolerable sectarian and supremacist provocation.
> 
> 'Polychrest': in this universe, a real ship, which might mean that Jack Aubrey is also a historical personage.
> 
> ‘I think you can still be fined ten pounds for that': that is, giving food intended for humans to birds or other animals, an offence attracting heavy fines during the war.
> 
> 'The wily and inscrutable Persian must at all costs be prevented from doing as Mr Attlee does...': eventually, the cause of the CIA- and SIS-sponsored coup that unseated Mohammad Mossaddegh in 1953. 
> 
> Lyceum: music-hall Cockney.
> 
> The Royal Naval College at Dartmouth depicted here is the AU one of the Marlowverse, where cadet entry at age 13 persisted after it did in reality. Other errors may also be attributed to this slight AU, to spare my blushes.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from Antonia Forest, _The Cricket Term_.


End file.
